In network devices, such as a router or an Ethernet switch, a network device is composed of several line cards and switching network boards, in which a switching network board further includes several switching chips, and the switching network boards interconnect the line cards.
When the network traffic is continuously increased, the capacity of one switching network board cannot satisfy the requirement of network communications, and a cluster of switching network boards are used for performing data switching among more and more line cards.
FIG. 1 is a schematic principle diagram of communications among a cluster of switching network boards and cluster of line cards in the prior art, and the specific communication process mainly includes the following steps.
The switching network boards interconnect multiple line cards, and forward data packets among the multiple line cards. The forwarded data packets include two types of data packets, one is unicast data packet (forwarded from one line card to another line card) and the other is multicast data packet (forwarded from one line card to one or more line cards).
In use, all line card chassis must be designed to comply with a same switching network communication standard. If not, the data switching would be interrupt for an unacceptable format of the switched data.
Therefore, the communication process among the central switching network board and the line card chassis in the prior art cannot be applicable to the communications among line card chassis complying with different communication standards.